I am bringing this to attention because SMOD will not be able to mount the new VPK files, and according to reports will make SMOD crash out with a MountFileSystem error should you have CSS or HL2DM mounted in addcontents.txt. Steam will most likely not download the GCF files again should you reinstall these games after this update.

The only games affected that are relevant to SMOD (so far) are Counter Strike: Source and Half-Life 2: Deathmatch, Valve has also updated Half-Life 2 and its Episodes with this as of 6/29/13.

Therefore, I advise all of you to backup the following GCF's in steam/steamapps to disks or flash drives before going through with the steampipe conversion:

There might be a few unneeded .GCF's in that list, but I'm not taking chances in excluding a critical file. It is important you back these up before running CS:S or HL2:DM as Steam will convert these to .VPK and delete the GCF's from your hard drive. However, should you no longer have some of these .GCF files, the ones from the .VPK's are still compatible in most cases. Read on for details.

Fortunately, SMOD thought forward enough that you can get around this issue and still mount content from these games...provide you have spare HDD space and don't mind a little manual work. The following fixes allow you to mount content from any affected games with no issues. Even better, future Steam updates will not affect these folders, effectively future-proofing SMOD from any other updates that could break compatibility.

TUTORIALS

HOW TO FIX HALF-LIFE 2: DEATHMATCH:

1: Use GCFScape to extract the contents of half-life 2 deathmatch.gcf to its own, respective folder somewhere. For the sake of this, it'll be C:\SMOD_Games\HL2DM

2: Open your SMOD's addcontents.txt file in its scripts folder. Look for these lines:

1: Use GCFScape to extract the contents of hl2mp_pak_dir.vpk in the steamapps\common\Half-Life 2 Deathmatch\hl2mp\ folder to its own, respective folders somewhere. For the sake of this, it'll be C:\SMOD_Games\HL2DM_SteamPipe

SPECIAL NOTE: A few maps were updated during the Orange Box update that will not run under SMOD's Source 2006 engine. A fix for these maps can be downloaded here. Extract or copy the maps into your SMOD install instead of the CSS SCIFI folder.

1: Use GCFScape to extract the contents of counter-strike source shared.gcf to its own, respective folders somewhere. For the sake of this, it'll be C:\SMOD_Games\CSS.

2: Open your SMOD's addcontents.txt file in its scripts folder. Look for these lines:

SPECIAL NOTE: A few maps were updated during the Orange Box update that will not run under SMOD's Source 2006 engine. A fix for these maps can be downloaded here. Extract or copy the maps into your SMOD install instead of the CSS SCIFI folder.

1: Use GCFScape to extract the contents of cstrike_pak_dir.vpk in the steamapps\common\counter-strike source\cstrike\ folder to its own, respective folders somewhere. For the sake of this, it'll be C:\SMOD_Games\CSS_SteamPipe

2: Copy the "maps" folder from steamapps\common\counter-strike source\cstrike\ into C:\SMOD_Games\CSS_SteamPipe or equivalent folder.

3: Open your SMOD's addcontents.txt file in its scripts folder. Look for these lines:

1: Use GCFScape to extract the contents of hl2_pak_dir.vpk, hl2_misc_dir.vpk, hl2_sound_misc_dir.vpk, hl2_sound_vo_english_dir.vpk, and hl2_textures_dir.vpk, in the steamapps\common\Half-Life 2\hl2\ folder to their own, respective folder somewhere. For the sake of this, it'll be C:\SMOD_Games\HL2_SteamPipe

2: Copy the "maps" folder from steamapps\common\Half-Life 2\hl2\ into C:\SMOD_Games\HL2_SteamPipe or equivalent folder.

3: Open your SMOD's addcontents.txt file in its scripts folder. Look for these lines:

DARN!!! Steam!!! God I hate steam updates!!! But luckily for me all my gcf are still intact since I hardly turn on steam lately, tnc god! Probably I just gotta make an smod standalone so I can replay smod css sci fi my fav whenever I want to without pesky steam's resource hog and never ending updates of doom, LoL!